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A small-scale thermal arc-jet facility based on a 21.5 kW tungsten inert gas welding power supply has been developed. The design and simulations are presented here. The plasma generator is situated inside a vacuum vessel forming an Argon plasma with a mass flow rate of approximately 0.2 g/s. The vessel is evacuated by a series of pumps providing sufficient suction to keep the vessel below 125 Pa during continuous operation. The system is designed with regards to heat transfer and vacuum performance with the goal of keeping component temperatures pressures below critical values to prevent material failure and enable adequate vacuum. The thermal design of the plasma generator includes a water cooling circuit which keeps the copper anode below melting temperatures. A viscous reacting 2D axisymmetric simulation is carried out using Eilmer4 simulating the nozzle flow including the stagnation chamber and the free jet impinging onto a 40 mm diameter sphere-cone model. The simulations predict a maximum heat flux on the model surface of approximately 800 kW/m 2 when a plasma total temperature of 7400 K is assumed.

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The second sharp-edged flight experiment is a faceted suborbital reentry body that enables low-cost in-flight reentry research. Its faceted thermal protection system consisting of only flat radiation-cooled thermal protection panels is cost-efficient since it saves dies, manpower, and storage. The ceramic sharp leading edge has a 1 mm nose radius in order to achieve good aerodynamic behaviour of the vehicle. The maximum temperature measured during flight was 867°C just before transmission ended and was predicted with an accuracy of the order of 10%. The acreage thermal protection system is set up by 3 mm fiber-reinforced ceramic panels isolated by a 27 mm alumina felt from the substructure. The panel gaps are sealed by a ceramic seal. Part of the thermal protection system is an additional transpiration-cooling experiment in which nitrogen is exhausted through a permeable ceramic matrix composite to form a coolant film on the panel. The efficiencies at the maximum heat flux are 58% on the porous sample and 42% and 30% downstream of the sample in the wake. The transient load at each panel location is derived from the trajectory by oblique shock equations and subsequent use of a heat balance for both cooled and uncooled structures. The comparison to the heat balance HEATS reveals heat sinks in the attachment system while the concurrence with the measurement is good with only 8% deviation for the acreage thermal protection system. Aerodynamic control surfaces, i.e., canards, have been designed and made from a hybrid titanium and ceramic matrix composite structure.